Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify and classify the various initiatives developed and implemented across the globe for the abatement of maritime air emissions. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, an extensive survey of various sources was conducted, including the official reports of international and regional institutions, government policy documents, port authority websites, classification society pages, private firms’ sites and the academic literature. The initiatives were then categorized in accordance with the classification of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and analyzed using the SPSS Statistics software to give some insight into their frequencies and the interrelationships between them. Findings: This exploratory review resulted in the establishment of a comprehensive global database of initiatives encouraged by the whole range of shipping stakeholders and decision-makers for the reduction of shipping air emissions. According to the findings, economic incentives that provide motivation for the adoption of less environmentally damaging practices are the most commonly used initiative, followed by infrastructure investments and informative policies. Research limitations/implications: The results provide implications for further research that include an in-depth analysis of ports’ policies, as well as an evaluation of initiatives applied on a large scale to map their emissions reduction potential for shipping. Originality/value: The main contribution of this paper is the identification and analysis of all the diverse initiatives implemented globally in a comprehensive way and its dealing with air pollution from shipping as a whole.

This study analyses how port governance systems in Europe have influenced the implementation of port initiatives focused on promoting modal shifts in freight transportation. Through a comprehensive review of port strategies, this research identified 49 individual modal shift initiatives among 21 port authorities in Europe. The results show that ports located in the Northern regions and managed by local governments, particularly in Belgium and the Netherlands, are leaders in executing strategies for modal shifts in freight transportation. Technological solutions and promoting intermodal transportation were found to be the most popular initiatives used to promote hinterland movements of freight by rail and waterborne transportation.

This article examines the determinants of traffic in European ports in 2010 by estimating a generalised linear model with a gamma distribution. We examine the influence of various economic and geographic attributes of the urban areas in which the ports are located, along with the influence of variables that identify the intensity of competition that the respective port authorities face. We include a range of explanatory factors of port traffic including the GDP of the urban area, location, the share of transhipment traffic, the share of dedicated terminals, the volume of traffic from neighbouring ports, the level of connectivity with other transportation modes and the port's model of governance. Our results suggest that variables outside of port manager control, like the economic size of the urban area or the amount of traffic of neighbouring ports, are key determinants of the traffic that a port is able to reach.